Trouble Came to the Turnip

Caroline Bird

These poems contain the most vivid and strange images - but how apt! Wonderfully wild - if not always immediately understandable. I will look out for more of her work.

Extract

As a young woman,
this librarian could knit a dress from a yogurt-pot;
now she must knit trousers with a silver hat-pin. She finds relief
in locking tabby-cats in her kitchen for thirty years.
On the thirtieth year, she knits them into bookmarks.
from A Gentlewoman's Pornography

Finch

Jeff VanderMeer

Immerse yourself in this Noirest of steampunk if you dare . In a city occupied by a fungal race, many are forced to collaborate. Finch is a reluctant detective who uncovers much more than who killed whom. His world is claustrophobic, dark and oppressive and you need a strong stomach to read on. But the page-turning plot, the vividness of the setting and the beauty of the elliptical writing make it compelling.

Extract

A little after six, the gray caps began to arrive. The night shift.

The first one pulled aside the curtain. Had emerged from the awful red-fringed hole at the back. Perfect parallel to the memory hole. Only much larger. Finch could see the gray cap's face under the hat. Pulsing. Wriggling. The eyes so yellow. What did they see that he could not?

The gray cap stepped forward, onto the carpet.

In the light of day, on certain streets, Finch could almost pretend that the Rising had never happened. But not here. Not now. Any fantasy was fatal. Any fear.

Under the Skin

Michel Faber

An extraordinary discovery - one of those books that are the reason that we all keep reading. Nailbitingly tense, profoundly intriguing, the type of read that you can't put down or get out of your thoughts. Poignant, lyrical, frightening, horrifying, and run through with a core of rage and sadness that is hard to shake off.

Extract

He pawed nervously at the alien substance on his breast. then murmered in wonderas it melted between his fingers. He looked at Isserley as if shehad organised this whole display herself; as if she had just up-ended the whole universe for him, in case it might charm him for a moment.
'Just watch,' she said. 'Don't talk. Just Watch'
Together they sat in Isserley's little car as the sky unburdened its load. Within half an hour all the land around them was dusted with white, and a brilliant crystalline lather was climbing up the windscreen.

Salamander

Thomas Wharton

A magical tale about the adventures of a Renaissance printer and his companions. This is a novel of full of ideas, myths and fantasies. Just the thing for a rainy weekend. The plot is quite fractured, and far from linear but if you are a booklover stay with it, because it's all about books, reading and love and will give you lots of food for thought and some memorable pictures.

Extract

The descending wall came to rest and immediately folded in the middle to form a corner. The immense hall Flood's bed had rolled into earlier had vanished, and they were now in a small rectangular room, into which bookshelves began to rise from the floor. The Count smoothed out his silk napkin on the tabletop. He folded it in half, then in half again, his eyes not for a moment leaving the printer's. After several folds he held up a thick, compact white bundle.
I want you, Mr. Flood, to create for me an infinite book.
Infinite?
A book without end. Or beginning, for that matter.

Nova Swing

M John Harrison

If you like your metaphysics upbeat and genetically tailored, this is for you. The only familiar points of reference are the tacky bar in a decaying port, and the lazy cop with a maverick assistant. Everything else is institutionalised uncertainty.

Extract

By the time the cats began to pour back into the event site, up Straint Street and past the yellow window of Liv Hula's Black Cat White Cat bar, it was raining again. Five in the morning. A few people would be out once the street had cleared, workers who used Straint as a short cut through to the ion works. A few shop assistants and clerks with rooms nearby, making their way down into the city proper; a few fighters making their way back from Preter Coeur. But generally Straint was unfrequented, and every morning at that time, the light seemed less to be coming back into things than leaving them for good. Liv Hula's window was the only lively thing in that part of Saudade. It illuminated the sidewalk. Seen from outside, two or three all-night drinkers, isolated by its rectangularity so they seemed to have nothing to do with each other, could look like a warm crowd. They looked like people you might enjoy to know.

Baudolino

Umberto Eco

Baudolino is the ultimate joker in the pack of history, a liar and a prankster and a brutal truth teller. Myth, religion and the historical record are portrayed as a practical joke, a convenient lie to cover the machinations of the powerful. The more history you know, the funnier and more serious this book becomes.

Extract

Baudolino knew that a good relic could change the fate of a city, cause it to become the destination of uninterrupted pilgrimage, transform a simple church into a shrine. Who might be interested in the Magi? Rainald came to mind: he had been given the archbishopric of Cologne, but he had still to go there for his official consecration. To enter one's own cathedral with the three Magi would be a great deed. Was Rainald looking for symbols of imperial power? Here he had, within reach, not one but three kings who had also been priests.

He asked the old man if he could see the bodies. The priest required Baudolino's help, because they had to shift the lid of the sarcophagus until they had uncovered the box in which the bodies were kept.

A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven

Karl O Knausgaard

Odd, but enthralling description of the history and decline of angels as seen through the eyes of Antinous Bellori, who meets an angel as a boy. You don't have to know the Old Testament to enjoy this book, but you will know a lot about the Old Testament after reading it. And none of this gives the story away. Although why it ends up in Norway is anyone's guess.

Extract

And then you could see the cherubim. They were clearest at night of course, but it had been many years since she'd been here so late. The morning was her time, and it was in its changing hues that she saw the cherubim's flames, burning with varying intensity depending on the time of year. Sharply and clearly in the autumn and winter, pale and almost translucent in the spring and the summer.

Manual

Daren King

The somewhat taboo issues of sexual deviations, petty crime and blackmail explored in this book are partly censored by a child-like writing style. I was often left wondering about the narrator, Michael and his sidekick Patsy's seemingly reduced mental capacity until the end when all became clear. Love it or hate it, it stays on your mind.

Extract

Baby wants to work in the fetish industry. Edward told me this on the telephone. I do not believe this.
The cafe is called Sarahs. there is no apostrophe. The cafe does not belong to Sarah. The cafe contains Sarahs, plural.
Patsy does not want to teach Baby Girl. 'She weighs less than Owl. And Owl is light as a feather.'
Patsy is cross.
Patsy folds her arms.
'Clients will like that,' I explain. 'The smaller the dom, the more the client has to submit.'

White is for Witching

Helen Oyeyemi

Bewilderingly brilliant. This story absorbs you from the beginning into the weird but intriguing world of grieving 18 year old twins, Miranda and Eliot, and the mysterious Silver House which seems to have a voice and mind of its own. If you’re prepared to surrender yourself to a gothic fairytale ride, there’s a Carroll-like Aliceness to this tale, which is unnerving, fantastical and enchanting in equal measure.

Extract

To live here without Lily ... Miranda found that the sadness was far, far bigger than her, and it was forcing her back. The wall she leant against had a damp, high temperature to it, like tears on skin.

Paprika

Yasutaka Tsutsui

Take a surreal adventure into the world of Atsuko Chiba a psychotherapist who works with amazing mechanical devices that allow her to enter her patients' dreams. Look beyond the unwieldy technological explanations and nonsensical dream-language to enjoy the whirlwind of phantasmagorical hallucinations that are both gentle and disturbing, bizarre and erotic. Watch out for late night reading sessions...this one could give you nightmares!

Extract

Baseball cap, sunglasses, moustache. He was every bit a film director, a stereotypical caricature of a film director. But he lacked the comical touch of parody. Paprika intuitively felt that this was a 'shadow', one of Jung's archetypes. It was without a doubt the 'potential self' of Noda, as the person who was having the dream. The film director must have been Noda himself; he had probably dreamt of being a film director when he was a boy.
'Did you want to be a film director?' asked Paprika, hoping to confirm her theory. The viewpoint of the dream instantly changed. Now it was seen through the director's eyes. Noda, the director, yelled at Paprika.
'Come on, it's ********! Ready! And-'
But before he could say 'Action', Paprika yelled back at him.
'Who's the cameraman?!' It could not have been Namba.
This appeared to come as a shock. Just as he was mouthing '********', Noda woke up. Paprika may have failed as a dream detective, but felt instinctively that she'd come close to the heart of the matter.

Primeval and Other Times

Olga Tokarczuk

This story scoops you up and rushes you along on a journey through the twentieth century in eastern Europe. The village of Primeval is imaginary, so are its inhabitants and its petty and vengeful God, but they are also archetypes which force you to look again at the long sweep of history.

Extract

In the book entitled Ignis Fatuus, or an instructive game for one player, which is the instruction manual for the Game, the description of the Fourth World includes the following story.

God created the Fourth World in a passion that brought Him relief in His divine suffering.
When he created man, He came to his senses - such an impression did he make on Him. So He stopped creating the world any further - for could there have been anything more perfect? - and now, in His divine time, He admired His own work. The deeper God’s vision reached into the human inside, the more ardently God’s love for man intensified.
But man proved ungrateful - he was busy cultivating the land and begetting children, and took no notice of God. Then in His divine mind arose sorrow, from which darkness seeped.

A Method Actor's Guide to Jekyll and Hyde

Kevin MacNeil

Anyone who has the opportunity to read this book, and doesn't take it, is really missing out on something wonderful. It sent me back to the original Jekyll and Hyde and it is difficult to work out which story is the more weird and disturbing. Kevin MacNeil turns the spotlight of his poetic imagination onto a story that we all think that we know so well, and creates a modern, horrific tale of identity, envy and malice. Brilliant.

Extract

Today in rehearsal, everyone's voices had changed when I came up close. Were they talking about me? Plotting to get rid of me? I just went up to them and said, 'Whatcha talking about?' Eyes darted to eyes darted to shoes.
'Oh, um.' said Drew, all stinking of salt and vinegar. 'Harris reckons every babe is born with blue eyes. Every single baby.'
'Course they are,' said Harris.
'That's kittens you're thinking of, Einstein,' said Juliette.
I knew they hadn't been talking about babies and cats. Liars, all of them.

Something Borrowed

Paul Magrs

The tone is set for occult antics on the seafront with Brenda, the long-lived bride of Frankenstein, now the landlady of a B&B in Whitby. Expect a light-hearted combination of gothic horror and situation comedy as together with her cantankerous friend, they protect the resort from supernatural menace. Full of irreverent one-liners, if you can suspend belief you’ll be rewarded with a wacky and entertaining read.

Extract

And what if my disguise ever fell away? What if people saw through all the fragile bits of my human alias? Some night when I thought I was blending in, and mixing with the everyday mass of people … what if all the wigs and the outfits and the skilfully applied make-ups simply dropped off? What if they could see through my feeble attempts to remain inconspicuous? And they saw me as a freak. A beast. A creature to be hounded out of town.
Well. It’s happened before, hasn’t it?